Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  I loved hearing these tales, in part because it brought out the old bravado in him—the same courage that, in the 1980s, when AIDS was largely unknown and invariably fatal, led Marcel to bronchoscope patients with active disease. At the time, not every doctor was willing to risk being on the receiving end of the coughing and spitting up. “Be careful, Marce,” I would tell him. He’d laugh.

  Friends and colleagues knew this part of Marcel—the headstrong cowboy—far better than I did. We hadn’t lived in the same city since he went off to medical school when I was 17. What I knew that they didn’t, however, was the Marcel of before, the golden youth of our childhood together.

  He was four years older and a magnificent athlete: good ballplayer, great sailor and the most elegant skier I’d ever seen. But he was generous with his gifts. He taught me most everything I ever learned about every sport I ever played. He taught me how to throw a football, hit a backhand, grip a nine-iron, field a grounder, dock a sailboat in a tailwind.

  He was even more generous still. Whenever I think back to my childhood friends—Morgie, Fiedler, Klipper, the Beller boys—I realize they were not my contemporaries but his. And when you’re young, four years is a chasm. But everyone knew Marcel’s rule: “Charlie plays.” The corollary was understood: If Charlie doesn’t play, Marcel doesn’t play.

  I played. From the youngest age he taught me to go one-on-one with the big boys, a rare and priceless gift.

  And how we played. Spring came late where we grew up in Canada, but every year our father would take us out of school early to have a full three months of summer at our little cottage in the seaside town of Long Beach, New York. For those three months of endless summer, Marcel and I were inseparable—vagabond brothers shuttling endlessly on our Schwinns from beach to beach, ballgame to ballgame. Day and night we played every sport ever invented, and some games, like three-step stoopball and sidewalk Spaldeen, we just made up ourselves. For a couple of summers we even wangled ourselves jobs teaching sailing at Treasure Island, the aptly named day camp nearby. It was paradise.

  There is a black-and-white photograph of us, two boys alone. He’s maybe 11, I’m 7. We’re sitting on a jetty, those jutting piles of rock that little beach towns throw down at half-mile intervals to hold back the sea. In the photo, nothing but sand, sea and sky, the pure elements of our summers together. We are both thin as rails, tanned to blackness and dressed in our summer finest: bathing suits and buzz cuts. Marcel’s left arm is draped around my neck with that effortless natural easefulness—and touch of protectiveness—that only older brothers know.

  Whenever I look at that picture, I know what we were thinking at the moment it was taken: It will forever be thus. Ever brothers. Ever young. Ever summer.

  My brother Marcel died on Tuesday, January 17. It was winter. He was 59.

  The Washington Post, January 27, 2006

  WINSTON CHURCHILL:

  THE INDISPENSABLE MAN

  It is just a parlor game, but since it only plays once every hundred years, it is hard to resist. Person of the Century? Time magazine offered Albert Einstein, an interesting and solid choice. Unfortunately, it is wrong. The only possible answer is Winston Churchill.

  Why? Because only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill the world today would be unrecognizable—dark, impoverished, tortured.

  Without Einstein? Einstein was certainly the best mind of the century. His 1905 trifecta—a total unknown publishing three papers (on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and the special theory of relativity), each of which revolutionized its field—is probably the single most concentrated display of genius since the invention of the axle. (The wheel was easy, the axle hard.)

  Einstein also had a deeply humane and philosophical soul. I would nominate him as most admirable man of the century. But most important? If Einstein hadn’t lived, the ideas he produced might have been delayed. But they would certainly have arisen without him.

  Indeed, by the time he’d published his paper on special relativity, Lorentz and Fitzgerald had already described how, at velocities approaching the speed of light, time dilates, length contracts and mass increases.

  True, they misunderstood why. It took Einstein to draw the grand implications that constitute the special theory of relativity. But the groundwork was there.

  And true, his general theory of relativity in 1916 is prodigiously original. But considering the concentration of genius in the physics community of the first half of the 20th century, it is hard to believe that the general theory would not have come in due course too.

  Take away Churchill in 1940, on the other hand, and Britain would have settled with Hitler—or worse. Nazism would have prevailed. Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.

  The great movements that underlie history—the development of science, industry, culture, social and political structures—are undeniably powerful, almost determinant. Yet every once in a while, a single person arises without whom everything would be different. Such a man was Churchill.

  After having single-handedly saved Western civilization from Nazi barbarism—Churchill was, of course, not sufficient in bringing victory, but he was uniquely necessary—he then immediately rose to warn prophetically against its sister barbarism, Soviet communism.

  Churchill is now disparaged for not sharing our multicultural late 20th-century sensibilities. His disrespect for the suffrage movement, his disdain for Gandhi, his resistance to decolonization are undeniable. But that kind of criticism is akin to dethroning Lincoln as the greatest of 19th-century Americans because he shared many of his era’s appalling prejudices about black people.

  In essence, the rap on Churchill is that he was a 19th-century man parachuted into the 20th.

  But is that not precisely to the point? It took a 19th-century man—traditional in habit, rational in thought, conservative in temper——to save the 20th century from itself. The story of the 20th century is a story of revolution wrought by thoroughly modern men: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and above all Lenin, who invented totalitarianism out of Marx’s cryptic and inchoate communism (and thus earns his place as runner-up to Churchill for Person of the Century).

  And it is the story of the modern intellectual, from Ezra Pound to Jean-Paul Sartre, seduced by these modern men of politics and, grotesquely, serving them.

  The uniqueness of the 20th century lies not in its science but in its politics. The 20th century was no more scientifically gifted than the 19th, with its Gauss, Darwin, Pasteur, Maxwell and Mendel—all plowing, by the way, less-broken scientific ground than the 20th.

  No. The originality of the 20th surely lay in its politics. It invented the police state and the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror—a breathtaking catalog of political creativity.

  And the 20th is a single story because history saw fit to lodge the entire episode in a single century. Totalitarianism turned out to be a cul-de-sac. It came and went. It has a beginning and an end, 1917 and 1991, a run of 75 years neatly nestled into this century. That is our story.

  And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon? Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was America and its allies. Yes, it was the great leaders: FDR, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Thatcher, Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

  The Washington Post, December 31, 1999

  PAUL ERDOS: SWEET GENIUS

  One of the most extraordinary minds of our time has “left.” Left is the word Paul Erdos, a prodigiously gifted and productive mathematician, used for “died.” Died is the word he used to signify “stopped doing math.” Erdos never “died.” He continued doing math, notoriously a young
person’s field, right until the day he died last Friday. He was 83.

  It wasn’t just his vocabulary that was eccentric. Erdos’ whole life was so improbable no novelist could have invented him. As chronicled by Paul Hoffman a decade ago in The Atlantic Monthly, Erdos had no home, no family, no possessions, no address. He went from math conference to math conference, from university to university, knocking on the doors of mathematicians throughout the world, declaring, “My brain is open” and moving in. His colleagues, grateful for a few days’ collaboration with Erdos—his mathematical breadth was as impressive as his depth—took him in.

  Erdos traveled with two suitcases, each half-full. One had a few clothes, the other mathematical papers. He owned nothing else. Nothing. His friends took care of the affairs of everyday life for him—checkbook, tax returns, food. He did numbers.

  He seemed sentenced to a life of solitariness from birth, on the day of which his two sisters, ages three and five, died of scarlet fever, leaving him an only child, doted upon and kept at home by a fretful mother. Hitler disposed of nearly all the rest of his Hungarian Jewish family. And Erdos never married. His Washington Post obituary ends with this abrupt and rather painful line: “He leaves no immediate survivors.”

  But in reality he did: hundreds of scientific collaborators and 1,500 mathematical papers produced with them. An astonishing legacy in a field where a lifetime product of 50 papers is considered quite extraordinary.

  Mathematicians tend to bloom early and die early. The great Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan died at 32. The great French mathematician Evariste Galois died at 21. (In a duel. The night before, it is said, he stayed up all night writing down everything he knew. Premonition?) And those who don’t literally die young, die young in Erdos’ sense. By 30, they’ve lost it.

  Erdos didn’t. He began his work early. At 20 he discovered a proof for a classic theorem of number theory (that between any number and its double must lie a prime—i.e., indivisible, number). He remained fecund till his death. Indeed, his friend and benefactor, Dr. (of math, of course) Ron Graham, estimates that perhaps 50 new Erdos papers are still to appear, reflecting work he and collaborators were doing at the time of his death.

  Erdos was unusual in yet one other respect. The notion of the itinerant, eccentric genius, totally absorbed in his own world of thought, is a cliché that almost always attaches to the adjective antisocial. From Bobby Fischer to Howard Hughes, obsession and misanthropy seem to go together.

  Not so Erdos. He was gentle, open and generous with others. He believed in making mathematics a social activity. Indeed, he was the most prolifically collaborative mathematician in history. Hundreds of colleagues who have published with him or been advised by him can trace some breakthrough or insight to an evening with Erdos, brain open.

  That sociability sets him apart from other mathematical geniuses. Andrew Wiles, for example, recently achieved fame for having solved math’s Holy Grail, Fermat’s Last Theorem—after having worked on it for seven years in his attic! He then sprang the proof on the world as a surprise.

  Erdos didn’t just share his genius. He shared his money. It seems comical to say so because he had so little. But, in fact, it is rather touching. He had so little because he gave away everything he earned. He was a soft touch for whatever charitable or hard-luck cause came his way. In India, he once gave away the proceeds from a few lectures he had delivered there to Ramanujan’s impoverished widow.

  A few years ago, Graham tells me, Erdos heard of a promising young mathematician who wanted to go to Harvard but was short the money needed. Erdos arranged to see him and lent him $1,000. (The sum total of the money Erdos carried around at any one time was about $30.) He told the young man he could pay it back when he was able to. Recently, the young man called Graham to say that he had gone through Harvard and now was teaching at Michigan and could finally pay the money back. What should he do?

  Graham consulted Erdos. Erdos said, “Tell him to do with the $1,000 what I did.”

  No survivors, indeed.

  The Washington Post, September 27, 1996

  RICK ANKIEL: RETURN OF THE NATURAL

  In the fable, the farm boy phenom makes his way to the big city to amaze the world with his arm. At a stop at a fair on the train ride to Chicago, he strikes out the Babe Ruth of his time on three blazing pitches. Enter the Dark Lady. Before he can reach the stadium for his tryout, she shoots him and leaves him for dead.

  It is 16 years later and Roy Hobbs returns, but now as a hitter and outfielder. (He can never pitch again because of the wound.) He leads his team to improbable glory, ending the tale with a titanic home run that, in the now-iconic movie image, explodes the stadium lights in a dazzling cascade of white.

  In real life, the kid doesn’t look like Robert Redford, but he throws like Roy Hobbs: unhittable, unstoppable. In his rookie year, appropriately the millennial year 2000, he throws it by everyone. He pitches the St. Louis Cardinals to a division title, playing so well that his manager anoints him starter for the opening game of the playoffs, a position of honor and—for 21-year-old Rick Ankiel—fatal exposure.

  His collapse is epic. He can’t find the plate. In the third inning he walks four batters and throws five wild pitches (something not seen since 1890) before Manager Tony La Russa mercifully takes him out of the game.

  The kid is never the same. He never recovers his control. Five miserable years in the minors trying to come back. Injuries. Operations. In 2005, he gives up pitching forever.

  Then, last week, on Aug. 9, 2007, he is called up from Triple-A. Same team. Same manager. Rick Ankiel is introduced to a roaring Busch Stadium crowd as the Cardinals’ starting right fielder.

  In the seventh inning, with two outs, he hits a three-run home run to seal the game for the Cardinals. Two days later, he hits two home runs and makes one of the great catches of the year—over the shoulder, back to the plate, full speed.

  But the play is more than spectacular. It is poignant. It was an amateur’s catch. Ankiel ran a slightly incorrect route to the ball. A veteran outfielder would have seen the ball tailing to the right. But pitchers aren’t trained to track down screaming line drives over their heads. Ankiel was running away from home plate but slightly to his left. Realizing at the last second that he had run up the wrong prong of a Y, he veered sharply to the right, falling and sliding into the wall as he reached for the ball over the wrong shoulder.

  He made the catch. The crowd, already delirious over the two home runs, came to its feet. If this had been a fable, Ankiel would have picked himself up and walked out of the stadium into the waiting arms of the lady in white—Glenn Close in a halo of light—never to return.

  But this is real life. Ankiel is only 28 and will continue to play. The magic cannot continue. If he is lucky, he’ll have the career of an average right fielder. But it doesn’t matter. His return after seven years—if only three days long—is the stuff of legend. Made even more perfect by the timing: Just two days after Barry Bonds sets a synthetic home run record in San Francisco, the Natural returns to St. Louis.

  Right after that first game, La Russa called Ankiel’s return the Cardinals’ greatest joy in baseball “short of winning the World Series.” This, from a manager not given to happy talk. La Russa is the ultimate baseball logician, driven by numbers and stats. He may be more machine than man, but he confessed at the postgame news conference: “I’m fighting my butt off to keep it together.”

  Translation: I’m trying like hell to keep from bursting into tears at the resurrection of a young man who seven years ago dissolved in front of my eyes. La Russa was required to “keep it together” because, as codified most succinctly by Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, “There’s no crying in baseball.”

  But there can be redemption. And a touch of glory.

  Ronald Reagan, I was once told, said he liked The Natural except that he didn’t understand why the Dark Lady shoots Roy Hobbs. Reagan, the preternatural optimist, may have had difficult
y fathoming tragedy, but no one knows why Hobbs is shot. It is fate, destiny, nemesis. Perhaps the dawning of knowledge, the coming of sin. Or more prosaically, the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether—and how—we ever come back.

  The Washington Post, August 17, 2007

  CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS:

  DEAD WHITE MALE

  The 500th anniversary of 1492 is approaching. Remember 1492?

  “In Fourteen Hundred Ninety-Two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Discovery and exploration. Bolívar and Jefferson. Liberty and democracy. The last best hope for man.

  The left is not amused.

  In Madrid, the Association of Indian Cultures announces that it will mark the occasion with acts of “sabotage.” In the U.S., the Columbus in Context Coalition declares that the coming event provides “progressives” with their best political opening “since the Vietnam War.” The National Council of Churches (NCC) condemns the “discovery” as “an invasion and colonization with legalized occupation, genocide, economic exploitation and a deep level of institutional racism and moral decadence.” One of its leaders calls for “a year of repentance and reflection rather than a year of celebration.”

  For the left, the year comes just in time. The revolutions of 1989 having put a dent in the case for the degeneracy of the West, 1992 offers a welcome new point of attack. The point is the Origin. The villain is Columbus. The crime is the discovery—the rape—of America.